How marketing automation strengthens your brand

How important is one’s brand in real estate?

That is the question we examined in last year’s Thought Leader Survey. As you might have expected, it turns out that brand is incredibly important to the vast majority of real estate leaders. At the top of the findings was how important the concept of ‘brand consistency’ is to real estate brokerage firms.

Brand consistency, which many believe is the #1 rule of branding, means more than just using the same logo. It means that every piece of your marketing material complements each other; they must feel like they are part of the same family. From unified typefaces, identical colors and fonts to similar designs and styles, every brand must not only have it’s own unique “look,” it must maintain it.

Power of your brand

Think about what happens when you watch a television commercial, especially one that doesn’t immediately reveal its brand name. Chances are if it’s a Target store ad, you’ll know almost immediately, yet the brand name is not revealed until the last frame. That’s a perfect execution of brand consistency. When a consumer recognizes your brand, it immediately distinguishes itself from competing brands. That’s not only brand awareness, but helps build brand trust, which leads to brand loyalty.

Real estate executives understand this. In fact, they told us that they believe that the ‘consistency’ of their brand is highly valuable to their business. Nearly 90 percent of the real estate leaders who were polled for last year’s Thought Leaders Survey gave brand consistency a ranking of 8 or higher on a scale of 1 to 10.

Yet if you were to ask real estate leaders who run real estate brokerage operations with 50 or more agents if they have found a way to achieve brand consistency, most are likely to tell you ‘No.’

That’s due to the vast majority of our nation’s more than 1 million licensed real estate agents are mostly independent contractors. Trying to maintain brand consistency among any large group of independent contractors – who you often rely on to share your brand –can be harder than herding cats. After all, agents often want to promote their own brand as well.

Automate your brand consistency

How can a real estate broker-owner make certain that every flyer, postcard, Single Property Website, YouTube video – everything an agent needs to market a home – is going to remain brand consistent?

The solution today is found in marketing automation. Brand consistency is one of the drivers that will make 2016 the “Year of Marketing Automation” in real estate. Our latest Thought Leader Survey shows that nearly one-third of the top real estate executives surveyed say they plan to implement Marketing Automation for the first time next year.